Too much of everything

Perfect cast and a good story

Fantastic!

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

It seems that the script was not much longer than the synopsis. The movie is pretentious and doesn't have that much of a deep meaning. The main character is written pretty badly so that affected the mr Stanton acting. Its cheesy, undpredictable and not believable. As for about mr Lynch's acting it's just god awful. From the beginning till the very end you wait when the movie to start, but it never happens. This flick is about nothing as the actors say it themselves. Usually it's not a problem when there's something else to compensate the lack of the good script. But this movie is just blend, uninspired, corny, empty.

This quietly meandering movie deals with the not often accentuated aspects of life such as decay and death in a gentle way. Moreover it exemplifies that life is valuable in all its stages and must and can be lived to the end in a beautiful, meaningful and proud manner. The tortoise (or turtle...) stands metaphorically for the desire for eternal life but it is concluded that it has to be left go off. The message of the movie is to face the end with courage and a smile like the Buddhist girl surrendering to the American soldiers on one of the many beaches of death during world war II. In the synopsis here the movie is said to be about an atheist, but I did not see such a denouncement made very explicit. Some of the symbolism could be interpreted as hinting at humanism, the big book on a stand in the man's house that suspiciously looks like a bible is in fact a dictionary. Everyday he passes by a green garden, appropriately accessible via a tunnel, but he does not seem enamored by its lure and just swears at it, you could infer his longevity a mere consequence of his refusal to enter. That the director has a penchant for hidden meanings and symbolism, some of which I probably missed or otherwise cannot explain extensively in a review could well have been an influence by his father David Lynch, well known for entering the realm of the surreal, who was in fact added to the cast as the man who lost said tortoise. Added gravity when watching this movie is the knowledge the lead actor had died before the movie was hardly fresh out of the cutting room so in this respect the movie itself is becoming a case in point of its own message. A final observation is that emotionally lasting movies do not require an extravagant budget.

Beautiful! A film that is good for the soul that - "doesn't exist"!

Sensível. Cheio de vida. Atuação magistral. Vale a pena conferir.